Doctors have had great success using vaccines to boost the immune system to fight infectious diseases like smallpox and measles, but only recently have immune system boosters been tried against cancer. The growing success of such attempts – a booming field called immunotherapy that was pioneered at UC Berkeley – proves that studying the way the immune system deals with these two types of invaders, cancer cells and pathogens, could greatly improve therapies for both. In this video, Russell Vance and Sarah Stanley talk about the advantages of combining the study of cancer with the study of infectious disease in UC Berkeley's new Immunotherapeutics and Vaccine Research Initiative.
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